Anniversary #3

Three years.  It feels good & right. There’s been change & growth. Dar feels comfortable telling me his opinions & I have learned to keep mine inJ. (Both in moderation, of course.) We have added Fiona to start our family & she is pure joy & entertainment. I’ve accepted that June was maybe not the best time for a berry farmer to get married. Celebrating our anniversary is a far cry from the luxurious plantation house & amazing food of our Charleston honeymoon. Our third anniversary was tacos from a taco truck, & a few hours without Fee.

Don’t feel sorry for me, though. We did sneak away for a few days last month. Central Oregon in May is not too shabby.  (At this point, anywhere without Fee would have been not too shabby! It was the first time we left her overnight since she’d been born!)

We spent most of one day driving over the mountains to central Oregon & then on a hike we found in the guide book we’d brought along. We haven’t done much hiking since we got married, so it was fine to break out of the norm. 

On our way in, while bouncing over back roads, Dar stopped the truck to point this little guy out! ( I thought I’d left all those in California!) He cut off the rattle to give to Riley. I kept one eye on the ground our whole hike, needless to say.

We hiked across the brow of a dry, windswept ridge & then down into a canyon. There was a little spring-fed stream we hiked beside down in the canyon, & it was a nice respite of green & shade compared to the initial ridge we’d started on. Lots of wildflowers & soaring rock walls towered around us.

Eventually the hike led us to where the little stream, which had become a decent little river, met the Deschutes River. It was impressive for what we saw when we first started: it looked like a barren wasteland & was hard to imagine the roaring river & large rock formations we’d see further down the trail. 

There is a spot where you have to ford the creek. It was a little over a foot deep & cold, but it felt good after our hike down the sandy switchbacks to get to the bottom!

(The hike is called Alder Springs, FYI, & is maybe 10 miles out of Sisters, although it feels a lot farther because of the back road access. It took us about 3 hours to do the 6 mile hike, but we lollygagged quite a bit.) 

I thoroughly enjoyed hiking with Dar. Especially without Fee. It is a rare day when she’s not stealing our attention-it felt so strange not to have her there! 

The rest of our trip we spent exploring the little town of Sisters. Latigo is a perfect date night eatery! A little spendy, but for special occasions, I highly recommend it. I had “duck breast seared in a miso marinade”. That kind of placeJ. I enjoyed my duck, btw.

We drove over to Bend as well, & walked an easy footpath trail along Benham Falls. It would be a good hike for kids. Relatively flat & not too close to any scary edges or water. 

I am thankful for where we are. Year three. It is pretty amazing to look back & see the relationship that’s been built through tough times & misunderstandings, flashes of pure sacrificial love, & an ever-growing understanding of eachother. I used to worry about marriage-how did one stay happy with one person for an entire lifetime? What if you suddenly met someone else that you connected with better, that was on the same wavelength as you? And I realize now; there probably are some men out there that would understand certain aspects of me better. But nothing, nothing, can replace the slow, day by day building of a relationship. It is such a beautiful thing, to be with one person, learning every little quirk about them & choosing to love them when it isn’t easy to. Love is more beautiful as it ages, I’ve come to find.